Modern healthcare requires the provision of services to patients by many health-care workers at a multiplicity of locations. In order to accomplish this, healthcare delivery is organized into specialized departments such as nursing, laboratory, radiology, pharmacy, surgery, emergency, administrative and other departments which are variously located at one or more sites. The management of these locations involves accumulating, processing and maintaining large quantities of information. This information is used in determining location availability, location suitability for a patient with particular medical conditions, billing for location occupancy as well as for patient tracking and other purposes. Consequently, there is a need for a computerized system capable of defining and maintaining location information for a health care enterprise and for supporting healthcare system operation by defining, processing and filtering location information for presentation to users and other system software applications.
Available healthcare location information management systems have limited capabilities and numerous deficiencies. Specifically, available systems are typically restricted in location structure models that are supported. In one such system, a lowest level location in a structure is constrained to be a patient bed that is in a room that is part of a nurse station, for example. Further, this lowest level location is considered to hold one and only one patient at a time. In addition, available systems typically require significant user intervention and Online Architecture System (OAS) coding to activate or deactivate locations in a location structure model. Similarly, such systems do not facilitate user friendly, timely modification and modification tracking of an existing location structure model. Available systems also conventionally provide limited capability to track patients in a healthcare enterprise. A patient assigned to a room as an inpatient, is not tracked if in a waiting room or another department for services (such as radiology for an xray), for example. A system according to invention principles addresses these deficiencies and derivative problems.